By Darryl Stewart, Head of the Herd
I phoned Monica, the controller for one of our customers, today. I asked her to do me a favour using her connections and begged her to let me take her out to lunch in return.
She did not want to go for lunch. I thought maybe it was me!
Much to my relief she sent me an email a short while later…
“It’s all good – just pay back for how good Kevin is to us – I really appreciate knowing he’s on the other end of the phone when I need him!”
by Lisa Tachan, Head of Spreading the Herd Word
Here at IBEX Payroll, we are striving to become one of the best places to work in Canada. Our unique work culture, along with a passion for great customer service, are what we pride ourselves on. We were reminded just how different we are from our competitors when we had a former employee of theirs join our ranks and become a member of the Herd. Nick has been with us for just over a month now, and with his experience in the payroll world, he’s been able to give us some insight into just how different it is to work at a place like IBEX.
“It’s like night and day,” Nick explained. “I think people are set up to expect less from the big companies. When you compare what the big companies do to what the Alpine Crew does here, it’s just a whole different philosophy.”
Nick explained that in most cases, if you use a large company to do your payroll, and there comes a time when you need some assistance with the payroll system, your phone call will go to a call centre setting where it is filtered through to a customer service rep. These reps are heavily monitored. The company will keep track of how many minutes their reps are on the phone with you, how many number of rings it takes before they pick up, how long a customer is waiting on the other line, and the number of calls they take in a day.
When Nick joined the team at IBEX, he had a few other things to get used to aside from the morning Herddle and “Go IBEX!” cheer that happens daily in the IBEX Herdquarters.
“I don’t mean to be rude or anything when I say this, but, sitting in on training with Kevin and Susan, there were just some things that they were doing for customers I was wondering to myself, ‘why are you doing this? Shouldn’t they [the customer] be doing it themselves?”
Nick went on to explain how he witnessed Susan error-proof a payroll for several of her customers. If something looked off to Susan, she would call the customer to double check that the information provided was correct before she sent it off to be processed. Kevin received an e-mail from a customer who wanted very little to do with the whole payroll process. This customer would just list the first name of their employees and how many hours each of them had logged for that pay period. Kevin would then enter that information into the IBEX system himself. At witnessing this type of service, Nick was amazed.
“That just doesn’t happen at the bigger companies,” Nick said. “Usually, they just run a payroll as soon as it is submitted. If there are any errors, the customer is out of luck and will probably be charged a fee to run another payroll. The type of customer service at IBEX . . . . it’s just . . . it’s the kind of service you think of when you think of great customer service. It’s like going back to the old days.”
Chalk 1 for the goats with the most, and zip for the guys in the suits. Smaller companies can do it better by challenging the way things have always been done.
Share some of your excellent (or not so great) customer service stories with us by commenting below!
Interested in becoming an IBEX Payroll customer? Visit this link for a free trial with our system!
By Darryl Stewart, Head of the Herd
This is the final post in our “How to grow your herd” series.
Summary of the first three posts:
In this final post, I want to give you some insight on how we want to represent ourselves to the world and how we plan to grow our company. How to grow your herd part 4 is all about spreading the herd word.
We have unique names for just about everything at IBEX. To give you a feel for this, at IBEX, marketing is called spreading the herd word, the payroll marketing team is called the Goatbuzzsters and we call our accounting department the Feed Counters.
IBEX has always been a unique place, but in the past we have kept this hidden from plain view. The thinking was that we must appear solid, secure, and serious (some might say boring and stuffy), like the companies we compete with, in order to be perceived as trustworthy. Payroll, after all, is a serious business. It must be done on time, government remittances must be paid properly, and system data needs to be safe and secure. In the beginning, we asked ourselves, who would trust a bunch of payroll specialists who have fun at work?
As it turns out, lots of people would.
When we began our growth strategy, we looked at who our customers are. Very few people signed up with IBEX without knowing us. Most of our customers were referrals from other customers, companies that have people we know working there, or people that have learned about us through our community work or one of the many stories that have been done about our unique work culture. It became apparent that the true IBEX was not something to hide, but something to tell the world about. We concluded that we should start letting more people know the real IBEX by finding unique and interesting ways to spread our one-of-a-kind message.
Another thing that was bugging us was that nobody in the Canadian payroll world had caught up to the expectations of web based services. People now demand open and transparent pricing, free trials, and even free versions of web based software. We believe this is the way people want to go about choosing a web based anything for themselves or their business. Our goal was to make this a reality for Canadian online payroll – and we did just that with IBEX!
Our marketing plan is simple.
We will make it known that we are striving towards making IBEX one of the best places to work in Canada. By letting the inner workings of IBEX become transparent for all to see, we can show the world what we are doing to reach our goals by sharing both our successes and failures along the way.
We believe in being open and honest about what we do and how we do it. By putting all our pricing right on our website and offering free trials and free versions of our system, people can experience us instantly, easily, and without the suffering of waiting for a salesperson to call.
Above all, the value of having fun at IBEX while working hard to meet system and customer expectations is what makes this company so unique compared to other payroll providers. We believe a high quality service comes from a hard working team who enjoys what they do. By maintaining an incredible work enviornment that emphasizes the element of ‘fun’ and ‘teamwork’, we believe that IBEX is on the right path to becoming one of the best places to work in Canada, as well as the top Canadian payroll provider.
We’re not afraid to set the bar high here because, well, goats can scale anything.
